Toxic Nostalgia

Making Russia great again.

What is it about the past? Even though we are condemned to live in the future, we can't stop fantasizing and fetishizing the past, and wanting to go back. On the gentle side, Proust wrote nothing but loving remembrances of his (sometimes mortifying) past, trying to evoke its moods, textures, smells, and feelings. But why does nostalgia so often curdle into bloodlust and terror? For that is where the Russian autocrat is going with his nostalgia for the Soviet era when Stalin ruled even more autocratically over a well-cowed populace extending from Hungary to the Pacific. Ah, those were the days!

It isn't just our current crisis- far from. The Trumpists want to make America great... again. The Muslim jihadists are bent on reproducing the pre-eminent dominance of Islam of 1300 years ago. The Serbs hearken back to their own grand empire of 700 years ago. Shia muslims fetishize their losses and in a theology of repair and redemption. Jews have both bemoaned their losses of their great kingdoms two millennia ago, and militantly sought their promised land back. And fundamentalists of all stripes yearn to get back to the basic tenets of their faith- the pure origins of incendiary belief and miracles.

It all seems a little over-determined, as though the operative emotion isn't nostalgia exactly, but powerlust, seizing on whatever materials come to hand to say that we as some tribe or culture are better and deserve better than we've got. While the future remains ever shrouded, the past is at least accessible, if also rather protean in the hands of dedicated propagandists. In Russia's case, not only did Stalin help start World War 2 by co-invading Poland, but the prior holocaust/famine in Ukraine, followed by the transplacement of millions of Russians into Ukraine.. well, that all makes this current bout of nostalgia far from sympathetic, however well-twisted it has been for internal consumption. Of course the propaganda and the emotion is mostly instrumental, in a desperate bid to fend off the appearance of happy, secure, and prosperous democracies on Russia's borders, which is the real danger at hand, to Putin and his system.

In remembrance of Russia's great patriotic war, which it helped start.

Yet, such nostalgia is strongly culturally binding, for better or worse. Rising states may have short histories and short memories, resented as the nouveau-rich on the world stage. They are not "as good" in some essential way as those whose greatness has passed into the realm of nostalgia. Worth is thus not in the doing but in some ineffible essentialist (read nationalist/tribal) way that is incredibly resistant to both reason and empathy. It is analogous to "nobility" in the class structure within most societies. In the US, we seem on the cusp (or past it) of our time atop the world stage. Do we then face hundreds of years of regret, comforting ourselves with tales of greatness and seething resentment?

With echos of a deeper past.

• Could the West have been smarter; more generous?
• Apparently, we are all going to die.
• Tires are bad.

American Occupations and Preoccupations

Douglass North on the role of institutions in our society, part 2. "Understanding the process of economic change". Also, "Violence and Social Orders". American occupations of Germany, Japan, and Afghanistan and Iraq are case studies of institutions at work. 

In part 1, I discussed the role of ideology and thought patterns in the context of institutional economics, which is the topic of North's book. This post will look at the implications for developmental economics. In this modern age, especially with the internet, information has never been more free. All countries have access to advanced technological information as well as the vast corpus of economics literature on how to harness it for economic development and the good of their societies. Yet everywhere we look, developing economies are in chains. What is the problem? Another way to put it that we have always had competition among relatively free and intelligent people, but have not always had civilization, and have had the modern civilization we know today, characterized by democracy and relatively free economic diversity, for only a couple of centuries, in a minority of countries. This is not the normal state of affairs, despite being a very good state of affairs.

The problem is clearly not that of knowledge, per se, but of its diffusion (human capital), and far more critically, the social institutions that put it to work. The social sciences, including economics, are evidently still in their infancy when it comes to understanding the deep structure of societies and how to make them work better. North poses the basic problem of the transition between primitive ("natural") economies, which are personal and small-scale, to advanced economies that grew first in the West after the Renaissance, and are characterized by impersonal, rule-based exchange, with a flourishing of independent organizations. Humans naturally operate on the first level, and it requires the production of a "new man" to suit him and her to the impersonal system of modern political economies. 

This model of human takes refuge in the state as the guarantor of property, contracts, money, security, law, political fairness, and many other institutions foundational to the security and prosperity of life as we know it. This model of human is comfortable interacting with complete strangers for all sorts of transactions from mundane products using the price system to complex and personal products like loans and health care using other institutions, all regulated by norms of behavior as well as by the state, where needed. This model of human develops intense specialization after a long education in very narrow productive skills, in order to live in a society of astonishing diversity of work. There is an organized and rule-based competition to develop such skills to the most detailed and extensive manner. This model of human relies on other social institutions such as the legal system, consumer review services, and standards of practice in each field to ensure that the vast asymmetry of information between the specialized sellers of other goods and services that she needs is not used against her, in fraud and other breaches of implicit faith. 

All this is rather unlike the original model, who took refuge in his or her clan, relying on the social and physical power of that group to access economic power. That is, one has to know someone to use land or get a job, to deal with other groups, to make successful trades, and for basic security. North characterizes this society as "limited access", since it is run by and for coalitions of the powerful, like the lords and nobility of medieval Europe or the warlords of Afghanistan today. For such non-modern states, the overwhelming problem is not that of economic efficiency, but of avoiding disintegration and civil war. They are made up of elite coalitions that limit violence by allocating economic rewards according to political / military power. If done accurately on that basis, each lord gets a stable share, and has little incentive to start a civil war, since his (or her) power is already reflected in his or her economic share, and a war would necessarily reduce the whole economic pie, and additionally risks reducing the lord to nothing at all. This is a highly personalized, and dynamic system, where the central state's job is mostly to make sure that each of the coalition members is getting their proper share, with changes reflecting power shifts through time.

Norman castles locations in Britain. The powers distributed through the country were a coalition that required constant maintenance and care from the center to keep privileges and benefits balanced and shared out according to the power of each local lord.

For example, the Norman invasion of Britain installed a new set of landlords, who cared nothing for the English peasants, but carried on an elite society full of jealousies and warfare amongst themselves to grab more of the wealth of the country. Most of the time, however, there was a stable balance of power, thus of land allotments, and thus of economic shares, making for a reasonably peaceful realm. All power flowed through the state, (the land allotments were all ultimately granted by the king, and in the early days were routinely taken away again if the king was displeased by the lord's loyalty or status), which is to say through this coalition of the nobles, and they had little thought for economic efficiency, innovation, legal niceties, or perpetual non-political institutions to support trade, scholarship, and innovation. (With the exception of the church, which was an intimate partner of the state.)

Notice that in the US and other modern political systems, the political system is almost slavishly devoted to "the economy", whereas in non-modern societies, the economy is a slave to the political system, which cavalierly assigns shares to the powerful and nothing to anyone else, infeudating them to the lords of the coalition. The economy is assumed to be static in its productivity and role, thus a sheer source of plunder and social power, rather than a subject of nurture and growth. And the state is composed of the elite whose political power translates immediately into shares of a static economic pie. No notion of democracy here!

This all comes to mind when considering the rather disparate fates of US military occupations that have occurred over the last century, where we have come directly up against societies that we briefly controlled and tried to steer in economically as well as socially positive directions. The occupations of Germany, Japan, Afghanistan, and Iraq came to dramatically different ends, principally due to the differing levels of ingrained beliefs and institutional development of each culture (one could add a quasi-occupation of Vietnam here as well). While Germany and Japan were each devastated by World War 2, and took decades to recover, their people had long been educated into an advanced instutional framework of economic and civic activity. Some of the devastation was indeed political and social, since the Nazis (as well as the imperial Japanese system) had set up an almost medieval (i.e. fascist) system of economic control, putting the state in charge of directing production in a cabal with leading industrialists. Yet despite all that, the elements were still in place for both nations to put their economies back together and in short order rejoin the fully developed world, in political and economic terms. How much of that was due to the individual human capital of each nation, (i.e. education in both technical and civic aspects), and how much was due to the residual organizational and institutional structures, such as impersonal legal and trade expectations, and how much due to the instructive activities of the occupying administration?

One would have to conclude that very little was due to the latter, for try as we might in Iraq and Afghanistan, their culture was not ready for full-blown modernity (elections, democracy, capitalism, rule of law, etc.) in the political-economic sense. Many of their people were ready, and the models abroad were and remain ready for application. Vast amounts of information and good will is at their disposal to build a modern state. But, alas, their real power structures were not receptive. Indeed, in Afghanistan, each warlord continued to maintain his own army, and civil war was a constant danger, until today, when a civil war is in full swing, conducted by the Taliban against a withering central state. The Taliban has historically been the only group with the wide-spread cultural support (at least in rural areas), and the ruthlessness to bring order to (most of) Afghanistan. Its coalition with the other elites is based partly on doctrinaire Islam (which all parties across the spectrum pay lip service to) and brutal / effective authoritarianism. When the US invaded, we took advantage of the few portions outside the existing power coalition, (in the north), arming them to defeat the Taliban. That was an instance of working with the existing power structures.

But replacing or reforming them was an entirely different project. The fact is that the development of modern economies took Western countries centuries, and takes even the most avid students (Taiwan, South Korea, China to a partial degree) several decades of work to retrace. North emphasizes that development from primitive to modern political-economic systems is not a given, and progress is as likely to go backward as forward, depending at each moment on the incentives of those in power. To progress, they need to see more benefit in stability and durable institutions, as opposed to their own freedom of action to threaten the other members of the coalition, keep armies, extort economic rents, etc. Only as chaos recedes, stability starts being taken for granted, and the cost of keeping armies exceeds their utility, does the calculus gradually shift. That process is fundamentally psychological- it reflects the observations and beliefs of the actors, and takes a long time, especially in a country such as Afghanistan with such a durable tradition of militarized independence and plunder.

So what should we have done, instead of dreaming that we could build, out of the existing culture and distribution of power, a women-friendly capitalist modern democracy in Afghanistan? First, we should have seen clearly at the outset that we had only two choices. First was to take over the culture root and branch, with a million soldiers. The other was to work within the culture on a practical program of reform, whose goal would have been to take them a few steps down the road from a "fragile" limited access state- where civil war is a constant threat- to a "basic" limited access state, where the elites are starting to accept some rules, and the state is stable, but still exists mostly to share out the economic pie to current power holders. Indeed the "basic" state is the only substantial social organization- all other organizations have to be created by it or affiliated with it, because any privilege worth having is jealously guarded by the state, in very personal terms.

Incidentally, the next step in North's taxonomy of states would be the mature limited access order, where laws begin to be made in a non-personal way, non-state organizations are allowed to exist more broadly, like commercial guilds, but the concepts of complete equality before the law and free access to standardized organization types has not yet been achieved. That latter would be an "open access order", which modern states occupy. There, the military is entirely under the democratic and lawful control of a central state, and the power centers that are left in the society have become more diffuse, and all willing to compete within an open, egalitarian legal framework in economic as well as political matters. It was this overall bargain that was being tested with the last administration's flirtation with an armed coup at the Capital earlier this year.

In the case of Afghanistan, there is a wild card in the form of the Taliban, which is not really a localized warlord kind of power, which can be fairly dealt out a share of the local and national economic pie. They are an amalgam of local powers from many parts of the country, plus an ideological movement, plus a pawn of Pakistan, the Gulf states, and the many other funders of fundamentalist Islam. Whatever they are, they are a power the central government has to reckon with, both via recognition and acceptance, as well as competition and strategies to blunt their power.

Above all, peace and security has always been the main goal. It is peace that moderates the need for every warlord to maintain his own army, and which nudges all the actors toward a more rule-based, regular way to harvest economic rents from the rest of the economy, and helps that economy grow. The lack of security is also the biggest calling card for the Taliban, as an organization that terrorizes the countryside and foments insecurity as its principal policy (an odd theology, one might think!). How did we do on that front? Well, not very well at all. The presence of the US and allies was in the first place an irritant. Second, our profusion of policies of reform, from poppy eradication, to women's education, to showpiece elections, to relentless, and often aimless, bombing, took our eyes off the ball, and generated ill will virtually across the spectrum. One gets the sense that Hamid Karzai was trying very hard to keep it all together in the classic pattern of a fragile state, by dealing out favors to each of the big powers across the country in a reasonably effective way, and calling out the US occasionally for its excesses. But from a modern perspective, that all looks like hopeless corruption, and we installed the next government under Ashraf Ghani which tried to step up modernist reforms without the necessary conditions of even having progressed from a fragile to a basic state, let alone to a mature state or any hint of the "doorstep conditions" of modernity that North emphasizes. This is not even to mention that we seem to have set up the central state military on an unsustainable basis, dependent on modern (foreign) hardware, expertise, and funding that were always destined to dry up eventually.

So, nation-building? Yes, absolutely. But smarter nation-building that doesn't ask too much of the society being put through the wringer. Nation-building happens in gradual steps, not all at once, not by fiat, and certainly not by imposition by outsiders (Unless we have a couple of centuries to spare, as the Normans did). Our experience with the post-world war 2 reconstructions was deeply misleading if we came away with the idea that those countries did nothing but learn at the American's knee and copy the American template, and were not themselves abundantly prepared for institutional and economic reconstruction.

• Tax evasion: our solemn duty and right.
• Defending our precious bodily fluids.
• Signs of isolation and loneliness.

They Thought They Were James Bond

Review of Legacy of Ashes, a history of the CIA.

Why do we still have the CIA? Its track record is atrocious on both operational and moral grounds, and much of its role has been assumed by the NSA and by military intelligence. It is fundamentally contrary in principle to everything the US stands for, making its reputation, such as it is, damaging abroad, and making recruitment at home excruciatingly difficult. It is a testament, in the end, to bureaucratic inertia and its own skills in backroom politics and public relations that it survives at all.

Headquarters of a bloated bureaucracy

Tim Weiner tells a totally biased history of the CIA, proving a truism of intelligence that everything bad ends up on the front page and everything good remains under wraps. This book covers every disastrous escapade from the exploding cigars sent to Fidel Castro to the torture of prisoners in a farflung network of black prisons and those of our "allies" during the "war on terror". What is even worse, however, is how its sterling successes, like its fomented coup against Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, or the arming of Pakistani proxies in the Soviet-Afghan war, turned out, in the end, even more disastrous than its front-page disasters. The Bay of Pigs made the US a laughing stock. But the melt-down of Iranian democracy haunts us and the rest of the Middle East, even the world, to this day.

The CIA has routinely lied to congress and to the president. It has, at other times, lied to the entire nation and world on behalf of the president, such as during the runup to the Iraq war. Its daily brief is notoriously bereft of deep analysis, and its ranks notoriously short of foreign language and cultural skills. 

Towards the end of the book, even while recounting a rising tide of mediocrity and error, Weiner oddly throws in repeated denunciations, evidently drawn from his stable of CIA veteran interviewees, of the underfunding and underappreciation of the CIA over recent decades. All in all, it is a difficult book (and situation) to make sense of. Yet it is clear that the CIA is a disaster zone, and we need to think carefully about how America's intelligence community should operate on a restructured basis.

One thing to note is that the US is simply not adapted, culturally, to run a great intelligence apparatus, as, say, Russia is with its KGB/FSB/SVR/GU. We are an open society with a well-founded dislike of deceit, and are not skilled at it. We also are a lawful society, unwilling to instill the kind of fear / terror that it takes to staff and run such shady operations. Aldrich Ames, for example, is enjoying a pleasant retirement at a medium-security prison in Terre Haute. Jonathan Pollard is now living a heroic retirement in Israel.

So, maybe we need some of the functions of the current CIA. But they should be made as compact as possible, not subsumed in the current bureaucratic dinosaur. The main function it does not need is the gathering of mundane foreign news via newspapers, low-level contacts, and fake visa officers, to create master "intelligence estimates". All that can and should be done by the State Department. Indeed, such functions should be increased with the addition of open person-on-the street contacts all over the world. We are frequently blind-sided by developments that intelligence agencies fail to see based on their derring-do, tradecraft, and focus in the highest echelons, and which normal people in that other society can easily see coming. These functions may even be replicated into red-team/blue-team competitions, with retrospective evaluations carried out to grow successful teams. The understanding of foreign cultures is a difficult task, and putting it into the hands of a white-bread secretive bureaucracy has not been fruitful. 

What would then happen to all the under-cover intelligence that we gather, mostly via the NSA and the satellite services of the NRO? These have been independent of the CIA for a long time. The CIA has not been "central" for decades. So we should dispense with the charade of special knowledge and integrated deep analysis, leaving that to the State department and perhaps the Director of National Intelligence. The CIA should be confined to espionage and covert operation in a focused way on current and future crises. It should not be meddling in Central American countries, running its own private foreign policy. It should not be trying to span the world with agents all over the place. It should not be trying to carve out bureaucratic slices from the NSA and other agencies with better track records.

Whether the CIA can even be successful in such a truncated remit is highly questionable, given its history. But at least it can then be judged more accurately, without all the distractions of routine newspaper reading, world-wide reporting, etc. It should stand or fall in whether it can supply high-level intelligence from our major adversaries- China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Iran, and North Korea, in any way beyond our technical resources. And naturally, it goes without saying that its covert operations need to be kept on a tighter leash, run not only by the president, but put on specific timelines of reporting to the NSC (cleared in advance) and select congressional oversight bodies (reported within thirty days). Malfeasance, either in reporting or in execution, would result in consequences such that the CIA fires poorly performing personnel, and keeps only a select and small cadre, perhaps in competing teams.

• Ministry of Love, in Eastasia.
• Let's go solar!
• Big soda- lethal and corrupt.
• The joy of piano.

Domineering Freeloader Decides Communism is the Answer

General, executioner, economic development czar, and head of the national bank of the Cuban revolution: the biography of Che Guevara, by John Lee Anderson.

Ernesto Guevara began life as a reckless, adventurous, and very intelligent kid. His first inspiration was medicine, indeed medical research on leprosy and other diseases common in South America, and he got a medical degree. But toiling away on small problems in the lab didn't fit his temperament, and he decided to bum around South America instead, living off the generosity of others, running up debts, fast-talking his way out of jams, and building up an implacable hatred of the US. A common thread through his travels from Argentina through Chile, Bolivia, Peru, and points north was the overwhelming influence of the US, usually corrupting the local political system for the benefit of mining interests in the south, and for the benefit of agricultural interests in Central America. Eventually he got caught up in the liberal quasi-socialist reforms of Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala, later fleeing to Mexico after a US-supported right wing coup.

It was there that he fell under the spell of Fidel Castro, eventually becoming, despite his evident non-Cuban origins, Castro's right-hand man at the head of the communist revolution in Cuba. Not that it started as communist. No, Fidel was a master politician, and started as an anti-communist, currying favor with the Cuban population and the US. But both his brother Raul and Che were dedicated communists by that point, in thrall to Stalin and Mao, and their influence, combined with the logic of perpetual, one-party / one-person power, brought Fidel around to a gradual process of revealing, after the revolution had already gained power and Che had executed resistent elements of the army and police, their new (red) colors. Then came feelers to Moscow and the rest of the eastern bloc, the Cuban missile crisis, and that is pretty much where things stand still today.

Che and Fidel, when times were good.

Anderson's biography is definitive- fully researched, well written, and judiciously argued. He portrays Che as a seeker- a youth on the prowl for good times, but also for a purpose, which he ultimately found in full-on socialism. He found himself most fully during the early fight in the hills of Cuba- a trial by privation, exhaustion, and blood- where he put revolutionary principles to work organizing his men, making alliances with the local peasants, and executing deserters and traitors. Che's socialism was a pan Latin-American Bolivaran ideal, where all the countries of Central and South America would band together- possibly even unite- under state socialism as inspired by the peasant revolutions of Russia and especially China. It was both austere and visionary- a whole continent escaping from under the yoke of the great oppressor- the US.

It is clearly a religious conversion- the epiphany of a wholly captivating ideal. Che became Castro's second in command by his great intellectual and leadership talents, but even more by his absolute dedication to the cause- the cause of liberation from oppression. Unfortunately, after cleansing the army and securing Fidel's rule, Che was assigned to make the economy run, and here he came up against the immovable obstacle- reality. Socialism is healthy in small doses, but communism has not, in Cuba as elsewhere, been able to run an economy. Motivation to work needs to be supplied somehow, and if it is not by the lash of money and its lack, then terror will have to do the job, and poorly at that. Che did what he could, but the system he had fought so hard to establish was impossible to operate, and his thoughts turned back to his first love- revolution.

It is here that we see mostly clearly the religious nature of Che's motivations and of communism generally. If he were a rational researcher in the template of medical or other research, he would have sat back and realized that communism was not working in economic and social terms, let alone in terms of personal individual liberation. And then he would have adapted intellectually and tried to figure out a middle way to preserve Cuba's independence while running a realistic economic system. Possibly even elections. Unfortunately, by this time, Cuba had settled into a dependent relationship with Russia, which bought its sugar and gave aid, preventing either economic or political independence. Cuba is today still relatively poor, in the middle to lower ranks of GDP. Not as poor as Haiti, however, (or North Korea), and therein lies a message, which is that the Cuban revolution remains relatively humane, despite its many debilities and lack of political, social, and economic freedom. The collapse of the Soviet Union shocked the communist government into slight openings for private business and a heavy dose of tourism from Europe, which sustain it today.

But instead of recognizing the errors and failures of his dream, Che fomented more revolutionary cells all over Latin America and Africa, paying special attention to one sent to infiltrate Argentina, one that he was to join himself and die serving in 1965. One can not fault his dedication or consistency, but one can question the intellect that took him and so many other idealistic freedom fighters over the twentieth century into communism only to author monumental disasters of political and economic mismanagement. To think that dictatorship would resolve the class struggle, and produce washing machines and military might ... it had to be a religious movement, which unfortunately, once in power, became incredibly difficult to dislodge.

The motive force obviously was the US. We, through our callous and greedy treatment of our backyard over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and our betrayal of the paternalistic impulse of the Monroe Doctrine, not to mention similar failures of principle in the Middle East and Vietnam, motivated the intense anti-Yankee hatred of idealistic men such as Che Guevara, and the peasant resistance that, at least in Cuba, gave him and Castro support. It is a fascinating history of what the US has wrought, and how our failure to hold to our own ideals has come back to haunt us over and over again.

• It has been abusive, unnecessary, toxic, and we will need some time to work it out of our system.

Cliques of Civilizations

Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations", twenty five years on.

Is America great again, yet? Well, that didn't turn out quite as promised. China is ascendent as never before, having vanquished a virus that we simply can not get our heads around. China is also putting the screws on its neighbors, assimilating Hong Kong, building island bases in the South China sea, ramping up soft power efforts in its Belt and Road and other diplomatic initiatives, and slowly building the sphere of influence that it merits as the largest nation in the world. In comparison, we are a laughing stock, our incompetent leadership high and low exposed for all to see.

It is quite a different world from that of Francis Fukuyama's "End of History", which imagined that international conflict would disappear with the close of the Cold War and the march of liberal democracy across the globe. Instead, while democracies did advance significantly in the first post-cold-war decade, progress since has stalled. An alternate model of governance has taken root out of the communist ashes- an authoritarian capitalist fusion of the Russian and Chinese types.

Numbers of democracies rose after the Cold War, then plateaued.

Samuel Huntington wrote his "Clash of Civilizations" in response to Fukuyama, offering a conservative, realist view of history as continuing apace in the post-cold-war era on a very traditional basis- that of civilizations, rather than of ideologies. Donald Trump seems to have read (or skimmed, or heard about, or heard about "people" talking about) Huntington with some attention, since his instincts hew quite closely to Huntington's views. Rather than liberal democracy resplendent and ascendent, Huntington proposes that the new world order will be a traditional sphere-of-influence model, centered on the core civilizations of the world- Western, Chinese, Orthodox, Indian, and Islamic. Africa is so far behind that it does not count seriously in Hungtington's scheme, though that may change a few decades on. The Catholic/Hispanic cultures of Central and South America also do not count for very much in his scheme. These civilizations are based on different religions and ethnic histories, and are centered on core states. The US is the core state of the West, (though the EU may take over that role sooner than anticipated!). Russia is the core state of the Orthodox / Slavic civilization, India is virtually the only Hindu state, and China clearly leads the Sinic or East Asian world.

The Islamic world lacks a clear core or leading state, with Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan all in contention, a contest that is still nowhere near resolution, and involves starkly different visions for the future of Islamic culture. Islam is a special case not only for its lack of a central or core state that can lead and moderate its civilization at large, but also for its general lack of effective governance, and its peculiar historical position of having had its golden age almost a millenium ago, after which the West gained progressive, and eventually overwhelming, superiority. The bitterness this engenders has not been channeled, as in the Asian tigers, into competition and often superior performance vs the West, but rather into regression, grievance, fundamentalism, and a rededication to its own cultural superiority. Thankfully, Huntington forecasts that by about now, the demographic bulge of Islam, which had been fueling much of its internal discontent and violent lashing-out, would moderate and lead to a less combative general culture- a prediction that I think is slowly coming to pass.

One of the most interesting themes of Huntington's thesis is the clique-like banding together of nations with similar civilizations. Unlike the American ideal of international affairs, where all people everywhere just want democracy and plenty of shopping, Huntington sees nations aligning on cultural terms, like people do in many other settings, like high schools, religions, neighborhoods, and so much else. The Balkan wars are, for Huntington, exhibit A. Each contestant was backed by its cultural kin among the larger countries, with the Muslim Bosnians supported by a variety of Muslim states from Saudi Arabia to Iran, the Orthodox Serbs supported by Russia, and the Catholic Croats supported by Germany, particularly the German Catholic church. Likewise, in the first Gulf war, Huntington writes that, while several Muslim countries were, under Americal pressure, part of the military alliance against Iraq, the Arab street was uniformly anti-West and pro-Saddam. His description of these sentiments and how they sapped their government's respective resolve about the war and its aftermath was sobering, and should have given the next Bush administration pause in its headlong rush into its own crusade against Iraq.

Another corollary of the civilizational world as Huntington sees it is that some cultures are odd nations out. Japan is a prime example. Clearly, Japan exists in the Chinese general sphere of influence. But Japan has been closest to the US since its defeat in World War 2, has adopted many Western attitudes and practices, a highly functional democracy among them. It also, through its wartime and pre-war imperialism, has earned the virtually undying hatred of China and Korea, among other countries in the region. What will its future be like in a world where China takes prime position over all of East Asia? Can it band together with anti-Chinese fellow coutries like Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea, and Australia to create a balancing anti-Chinese bloc? That looks generally unlikely, partly due to negative US leadership, and partly due to the obvious problems it entails, ending in some kind of vast war.

China's sphere and local conflicts.

What China wants as the regional, even global, leader, is actually quite unclear. The history of Korea is instructive in this regard. China has been Korea's big neighbor for at least 2,000 years, and has repeatedly enforced vassalage, favorable trade, and cultural exchange. But it never took over and tried to exterminate Korean culture the way the Japanese did before World War 2. China clearly seeks control over some of its fraternal cultures, like the Tibetan and Uyghur, and now Hong Kong and ultimately Taiwan. But Vietnam? What China wants out of other nearby cultures such as Vietnam, Korea, and Japan is not entirely clear, and some kind of vassalage relationship may suffice. Perhaps seeing the Yuan as the reigning currency, along with other clearly friendly military and trade relations would be enough for long-term stability.

More darkly, some nations in Huntington's system are "torn", in that they partake of more than one culture and therefore face diffcult conflicts, internally and externally. Yugoslavia was an obvious example, but there are many others. Turkey is one, in that it has for decades tried to enter the EU and be a Western country. But with increasing Islamization, this is increasingly off the table, and Turkey is moving towards leadership as a modernizing influence within Islam rather than being a little fish in the EU and lapdog of the US security establishment. Russia has also made its definitive choice, after centuries of conflicting sentiments about the West, turning against a possible turn to NATO and the EU in the post-Soviet moment, and retrenching as leader of the Orthodox civilization. Was it ever realistic to think that Russia might become a normal, Western parliamentary democracy, after its communist collapse? Perhaps not, though our wretched economic advice surely didn't help.
 
Huntington closes on very Trumpian themes, warning that increasing Hispanic immigration to the US may make us into a "torn" culture, less cohesive in international and other terms. Multiculturalism is clearly the enemy. He spins a truly bravura dystopian scenario towards the end of the book, where China and Vietnam spark a world war (with some blundering US intervention) that spirals out of control, Russia and India allying with the West. The US is hobbled, however, by Hispanic dissention, which causes a lack of fighting resolve, and we settle for negotiation! Yikes!

Much of what Huntington wrote was quite precient, especially in the turns that both China and Russia have taken against the West and towards rebuilding their traditional geographic and cultural spheres of influence in clearly civilizational terms. He warns against American universalism- the idea that everyone wants what we want, we just have to invade their countries and give it to them. That way lies imperialism, pure and simple. And his warning about unity in the US is significant. We need to continue to expect and encourage assimilation of immigrants, not social and political balkanization. But it turns out that the principal risk of disunity in the US comes from the native rich, not the foreign poor. The logic of hyper-capitalism and its related ills of political and media corruption has created a plutocratic class that treats the rest of the country as a vulture capitalist project- a place for tax breaks, pet politicians, flagrant propaganda, and walled compounds served by a feudal workforce. That is what is killing our institutions and destroying our standing in the world.

• Sunk costs and lost souls- Trump's enablers.
• Such as Sessions. But GOP voters are just as complicit.
• Should Australia be independent?
• Man or woman?
• The rich getting richer...
• Small steps in the right direction.

Iran: Object Lesson of the Enlightenment

Review of Iran: A Modern History, by Abbas Amanat. Part 2- the contest between autocracy, democracy, and theocracy.

Has history ended? Did all countervailing ideologies give up and yield to democracy as the universal form of government and does peace now reign? Apparently not. Indeed, democracy is embattled in many areas as it has not been in decades- even in the US, whose institutions are under sustained attack by a renascent autocratic / plutocratic coalition. Iran has exemplified the contest between the ideals of democracy, human rights, state stability, authority, and religious sentiment in ideologies of government over many centuries. It has been positioned at some remove from, though in durable if not tragic contact with, the European cultures that fostered the Enlightenment in all its aspects. What has been their impact, and what are we to make of the current result?

Amanat provides a magisterial overview of Iran's recent history, (recent meaning since 1500, which leaves out a vast portion going back to antiquity and beyond), focusing on its political systems as they range between autocracy and revolution, growth and decline, consolidation and decadence. Iran was heavily influenced by Europeans starting in the mid-1800's, as the great game got underway. While Russia was unapologetically autocratic, making its menace clearly lineal with previous contests against other invaders, Britain, and later the US, brought a new level of hypocrisy as imperial powers founded on Enlightenment ideals and practices, which were, however, not for foreign consumption.

The Qajar monarchy in the 1800's managed a weak position relatively well, keeping Iran intact and largely sovereign, if also continually corrupt, indebted, and backward. But finally, the modernist winds were too strong, and a constitutional revolution established a constitutional monarchy and parliament in 1906, then again in 1909. This parliamentary system never fully found its footing, however, tussling with the Shah for power, and buffeted through disastrous invasions and occupations during world war 1. It was sort of a Weimar Republic, never attaining full power in military or political terms.

But it embodied the idea of a Western-style, constitutional, democratic system. The addition of an Islamic advisory council was an afterthought and never seriously implemented during this era, since the ulama, or community of clerics, was generally content with its long-standing role of loose collaboration with the secular power, tending to a narrow sector of jurisprudence over religious, business, and personal matters, on a somewhat freelance basis. While the Shi'i clergy had occasionally led protests and fostered limited political activism in the face of gross injustices and suffering from their base among the small merchant class and urban poor, the idea of becoming a full partner in government, or its comprehensive adversary, did not cross their minds, since government was fundamentally unclean and not worthy of theology, short of the return of the twelfth Imam. The clerics were also fully invested in the somewhat corrupt system, having gotten quite rich from their segment of the economy.

But the trauma of the Pahlavi era, broken in the interval between father and son by a hopeful but chaotic constitutional period under Mohammed Mosaddegh, set the clergy- at least some of it- on a more activist path. Both Shahs were dedicated modernizers, dismissive of religion and destructive to the livelihoods and institutions of the clergy. Along with other islamists in the Sunni world like Qutb, they (that is, the less quietist elements, spearheaded by Ruholla Khomeini) started generating a comprehensive critique of modernism, the Pahlavi apparatus, and the West as antithetical to Islam, which it quite obvoiusly was and remains. They found that they still had enormous political power and public sentiment on their side, not among the intelligentsia, but among the common people who had been coming to the mosques, and requesting judgements, and paying their dues all along. All this was seized by Khomeini, who in 1963 gave fiery sermons denouncing the Pahlavi regime, and was duly detained, almost executed, and then exiled to Iraq. The Shah ran an economically successful few decades, but also a brutal secret service and a grandiose view of himself and the dynasty so severely out of step both with native sentiment and with the democratizing / human rights trends in the West, suddenly put on the top of the table by Jimmy Carter.

Faithful Shi'ite Iranians were interested in more spiritual fare than what the Shah offered, and the clerics, through Khomeini, gave them visions of an ideal society, rectified through "dear Islam" to resolve all the injustices and degradations of the Pahlavi era. In return, Khomeini was first elevated to the unprecedented status of "Grand Ayatolla", and then ultimtely to "Imam" status, which had never been done before, the twelfth Imam having been the last of the set, now in occultation. So the revolution rolled on with inexorable power, but also with inexorable revolutionary logic, piling up bodies and hypocrisies as the imperatives of staying in power overwhelmed all other scruples. For example, Amanat mentions with some acidity that, while centuries of Shi'i jurisprudence may not have foreseen the problems of writing a constitution, running foreign policy, or operating a secret service, it had long dealt, and dealt with care and discretion, in contract and property law. But all that went right out the window as the new government "inherited" or expropriated countless businesses and personal properties, took over all major industries of the country, and distributed their management to family members, cronies and loyalists.

Diagram of the Iranian government, from the BBC.

It is through the lens of the constitution and the cobbled institutions that have arisen in Iran that we can see the dialectic between Enlightenment principles and Islamic principles. Khomeini promised a democracy, where power would no longer be monopolized by a somewhat mad Shah. But it also had to be an Islamic democracy, "guided" by the clerics to retain purity and justice. The logic of all this resulted in a thoroughly theocratic state, where there is an interlocking set of instutions all run by the clerics, from the Supreme Leader to the Guardian Council, Assembly of Experts, and Expediency Discernment Council. Each are supervisory, with various veto and appointment powers, leaving the popularly elected parliament with little real power or even representative complexion, since its candidates are routinely disqualified by the Guardian Council for not being conservative enough.

In practical terms, this means that the system maintains just enough democracy to foster some hope and buy-in from some of the populace, while keeping complete control in the hands of the clerics. Will this end in utter corruption of both religion and government? It is difficult to say, but Iran has more of a functional democracy and republican system than many other Muslim countries, which is sadly not saying much. Those who reflect on the very origins of Islam and Shi'ism can readily see that theory of government is not a strong suit of this tradition. I see Khomeini as a demagogue- a Trumpian figure who promised the stars, offered a telling and comprehensive critique of the Pahlavi system, and had a genius for turning a phrase. But he did not promise a coherent and democratic program of governance, rather a messianic dream and relentlessly divisive politics. In the revolutionary process, he always played to the base, favoring extreme positions. A base whose core, there as here, is a religious element of great patriarchial conservatism and dismissive of intellect and compassion. He was fully behind the hostage-taking students, for instance, which solidified support at home while making Iran a pariah abroad.  Hate, of course, was and continues to be central to the Iranian theocracy, from the Great Satan (us), to the little Satan (the Iraq of Saddam Hussein), to the communist Tudeh party, to the Baha'i religion, which they particularly revile and persecute.

At first, the clerics worked with liberals to fashion a written constitution (a significant concession to modernity and Western ideas) and a civilian government. But as time went on, the many contradictions of this approach became apparent, since if the people were given real power, the clerics would lose theirs- that was a lesson of the first constitutions of the early 1900's, and again during revolutionary process in the 1970's and 80's, which saw many contestants for power. The clerics only won due to their cohesion and their ability, time and again, to move the masses with demagogic and messianic appeals.

So the Iranian clerics ended up in unknown territory, creating a government that had no Persian or Koranic precedent, other than putting clerics in charge of everything (including at the top, the monarch-for-life Supreme Leader), and hoping that their own formation, training, and institutions will keep them uncorrupted. At one dire point in the revolution, a hanging mullah suggested that his rather under-supported decisions didn't matter that much, since God would sort it all out in the end, sending those who deserved it to heaven. But by that logic, he should have killed himself first. It is always curious how those who supposedly believe in religion and the glories of its afterlife turn out to have a strong regard for their own lives in the here and now. One would think that meeting one's maker would be a more positive goal, rather than being a mere scrim for power politics in this fallen world.

Iran gets ranked just above China in the democracy index.

Anyhow, Iran has ended up with more torture, more executions, more war, a bigger secret service, a more intrusive state, and less freedom, than the Pahlavi era. It turned out that Islam is not a guarantee of good, let alone moral, governance. Islamic countries generally occupy the lower rungs of the democracy index, and other indexes of development and happiness. This while Islam portrays itself as a religion of peace, of mercy, and of the most exacting jurisprudence and scholarship. The revolutionary government of Iran dabbled in liberalism, and wrote up a semi-democratic constitution, and faced a culture of great diversity and intellectual depth. But in the end, authoritarian logic won out over traditional Shi'i quietism and over most Western trends, creating a sort of Shi'i Vatican writ large, with opaque committees of old bearded men running everything, with additional torture chambers and gallows.

Iran offers an object lesson why the interlocking lessons of the enlightenment are so important- why withdrawing religious projections, drama, and righteousness from the state, in favor of civic secularism, yields a more rational and humane way of life. Why even the most long-standing and cherished religious traditions and "scholarship", while they may serve as selective institutions to weed out the stupid and socially unskilled, are not conducive to the search for objective truth or even a marker of moral superiority.

All that said, the French revolution began with enlightenment principles, which did not prevent a similar revolutionary logic from sending it to appalling depths of brutality, injustice, and authoritarianism. Yet it also spread more liberal, anti-monarchical values throughout Europe during the Napoleonic era, and ended up, after decades of historical development, with true democracy in France and Europe. The whole point of political theory in the Enlightenment was to allow such development via a fundamental humanism and humility in the civic sphere and the state. Its antithesis is messianism of various sorts, from communism to Shi'i theocracy, (even atheist enlightenment, when driven to extremes!), which drives polarization, extremism, and totalitarianism. Iran may yet develop in a softer direction, after what is now forty years of theocracy, but that would take a substantial change of heart on the part of the current ruling class, and perhaps a reduced allergy to Western ideas.

• Happy Quds Day!
• Changing conceptions of masculinity...
• Right wing legal community is going over the deep end.
• It is not clear that California is ready to re-open. Graph of the week:

Iran: Pawn in the Great Game

Review of Iran: A Modern History, by Abbas Amanat. Part 1- the great game and a history of victimization.

The lure of victimization narratives is a little hard to pin down, though it is universal. No matter how much power Republicans acrue, they always seem to feel victimized by the still-ascendent liberal culture, by rational or compassionate argument, and indeed by anyone who disagrees with them. Victimization is an assertion of moral righteousness, sometimes proven more pure and righteous in its defeat by forces of darkness than by its triumph. Christianity is a victimization narrative par excellence- of a savior tragically unrecognized in his own day, callously sold out and executed by the ruling powers, but ultimately, though the intercession of miracles, energetic preaching, and what have you, ready to save you if only you too believe this story. Victimization can be as callous and unthinking an ideological postition as its opposite- domination- excusing any extremity and moral lapse in the service of the restoration of what was lost or been suppressed. Indeed, victimization narratives exist in a complex dance with domineering ideologies, and are frequently used by them, as suggested above. The Nazis, after all, were victimized by the Jews.

But how much more intoxicating is all this if you really are a victim? Iran, in its long history, has played many roles. But over the last few centuries, that of victim has been predominant. Its early cultures, before and after the Indo-European invasions of the second millenium BC, usually played second fiddle to the Sumerian, Assyrian, and Babylonian cultures to the west. Then came the high point of the Persian Achaemenid Empire in the mid-first millenium BC, which spread over the entire Middle East, from Afghanistan to Egypt and Greece, and was memorialized extensively in both Greek and Jewish literature. Cruelly truncated by the invasion of Alexander the Great, Persia then went through extended domination by the Greeks in the Seleucid Empire, followed by somewhat cosmopolitan domination by the Parthians, a Scythian tribe from the East, before regaining most of its former extent under the Sassanian Empire, which was truly Persian in origin and culture again. Only to be brutally crushed by the Arab invasion. Gradually, Persian culture re-asserted itself, forming the backbone of the Islamic Golden Age, which whithered amid the Mongol invasions and a reversion to doctrinaire Islam. One hardly knows which oppression to bemoan first.

The Azadi tower. Take that, Brandenburg gate! This is perhaps the most durable and iconic bequest of the second Shah's rule, adopted by all sides in Iran, whether protesting for or against the powers that be.

The coronavirus lockdown has brought me one consolation, which is this lengthy tome on Iranian history, borrowed just before the boom came down, and which the library shows no sign of wanting back. Amanat takes up the story at 1500 CE with the rise of a militant Shiite ruler, Ismail I, who set the tone for Iranian culture up to today: a full-on victimization passion play, with oppressors ranging from Abu Bakr and Yazid I to the United States, heart-rending mourning, and self-flagellation. The story of Iran is one of a small country with big ambitions, which it occasionally fulfills. Why didn't Persia remain a large empire and culture, like Rome did, even after its formal fall? On the one hand, there were too many other competing cultures about. The Persians could not quite put together a world-leading coalition. The Achaemenids, under Cyrus the great, came closest, setting a cosmopolitan standard that was widely attractive and powerful. At least the Jews gave it good press. But it fell apart amid civil war and the usual bane of early empires- dysfunctional or non-existent methods of transferring power. The Safavid dynasty, begun in 1501, set Shi'ism as the national religion of Iran. This had the twin effects of being highly motivational to the "base", while being rather isolating vs the wider world, including the Sunni majority across Islam. The course was thus set for Iran to be a small-to-mid-sized power, a box they are still trying to break out of today, to little effect.

Over the last few centuries, Iran's major antagonists have been the much greater empires of Russia, Great Britain, and the US. While there have been occasional raids from, and forays to, the East, towards Afghanistan and India, generally relations in that direction have been calm, and Persian culture has had significant influence in Afghanistan and Mughal India. On the other hand, expansionism and colonialism from the West and North have been devastating. Iran was barely able to hang on to its territorial and cultural integrity at the worst of times. Russia dealt Iran a comprehensive military defeat in 1826, took parts of the North, and threatened the rest of the country. Through the nineteenth century, Iran tried its best to play the big powers off against each other, playing its part in the great game. But just as often, the British and Russians would make their own agreements to carve up the local countries into spheres of influence, if not zones of occupation. They also engaged in destructive loans, saddling Iran with unpayable debts and increasing foreign ownership of its infrastructure, customs, and other means of paying them back. Russia sponsored a pro-shah coup in 1908. Britain especially forced Iran into a series of bad trade deals, privileged treatment, and forced imports, killing off the Iranian silk industry, among much other economic and cultural damage. And once Britain smelled oil, and switched its navy from coal to oil, (during world war 1), its regard for the integrity and interests of Iran fell even further. Russia and Britain each occupied large parts of the country during both world wars, without so much as a by-your-leave.

What saved Iran was an unexpected favor from Russia. The communist revolution led to an immediate evacuation of Russia's occupation of Northern Iran and cancellation of its debts, and, at least for a brief period, much friendlier relations. But it also led to simmering communist political and guerrilla insurgencies for the next century. Iran kept being knocked about between the great powers, with the US taking an increasing role during and after world war 2. The US had previously been one of the friendlier countries to Iran, providing critical financial advice and political support during its constitutional phase, during the Shuster appointment as treasurer, back in 1911. And the US was naturally thought to be supportive of constitutionalism, rule of law and democracy. But world war 2 changed all that, making the US more or less the inheritor of the British empire. When the first Reza Shah government finally collapsed and a nascent constitutional system arose, one of its first and most popular pieces of business, under Mohammed Mosaddegh, was nationalization of the oil industry. Britain, which ran the Iranian oil fields outright, sharing a paltry 16% with Iran, was outraged. The US, caught in the middle, was unfortunately more sympathetic to Britain than Iran. The US offered a 50% deal, in line with others in the region. This would have been a good compromise, but Mosaddegh had painted himself into a corner. And made many enemies across the political spectrum, not being, at base, a particularly good politician. His ouster, amid a coup staged explicitly by the Iranian military, but with support from the British and Americans, was not a big surprise at the time. Only in retrospect, after the subsequent regime of the second Shah dragged on, decade after decade, with unstinting US support, no matter the excesses of the secret services or oppression of the people, and with the backdrop of the US's brutal wars in Vietnam and Cambodia, did the narrative of the great Satan take shape. It was an understandable, yet also facile, and ultimately misguided response to yet another episode in Iran's long and often tragic history of international relations.

We won't get into the next parts of the story in this post, but reflect that size matters in international relations. The Shah stuck with the US through thick and thin, creating a rare stable environment for Iran internationally. No one questioned Iran's sovereignty, or its position in the cold war. None of its neighbors attacked. But when that sponsorship fell apart amid the Islamic revolution, and Iran started pissing off each of its neighbors near and far, things did not go so well, and remain perilous today. On the other hand, the US played a large part in the Shah's failure to manage internal affairs, losing sight of our principles (as we also did in Vietnam, then again in Iraq) and blindly funding a despot. Our best cases from this period were the various countries (South Korea, Indonesia, Philippines, Taiwan) that got away belatedly, through popular protests, out of US-sponsored dictatorships and towards democracy. Is that the best we could have done?

• Some notes on Iran's process of conversion to Islam.
• Studies in Shiite propaganda.
• Another dysfunctional country failing to deal effectively with the virus.
• And now, for a bit of science.

Russia and its Sphere of Influence

What happens if no one wants to be in your club? Review of "Putin's World: Russia against the West and with the rest", by Angela Stent.

History plods on, despite our pride in having achieved "modernity", so that everything can now stop and rest at our state of perfection. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Russia, where the past weighs heavily, affecting attitudes and policy in substantial contrast to interests and current conditions. Russia has been an imperial power for centuries, gradually beating most of its neighbors into submission and incorporating them into a multi-ethnic but hardly socially equal empire. This process was capped by the Great Patriotic War, aka World War 2, which ended with the USSR in control of new territories inside Europe, and others inside Japan, and with ideological friends in many other lands. It was not a happy empire, but it was a huge one, and the Russians were and remain proud of its achievement.

Then everything fell apart, and since the end of the Cold War, Russia has been trying to get it back. That would be a brief synopsis of Stent's book, which goes in very professional fashion through Russia's history, current relations, conflicts, and friendships all over the world. On the whole, Russia has over the last couple of decades managed its relations quite well, leveraging what little strength it has (lots of oil and gas, a ruthless attitude towards politics near and far, and a prodigious ability to suffer) into substantial strides back to relevance on the world stage.

But what should the West think and do about it? We came in for a great deal of criticism for our cavalier attitude during the breakup of the USSR. We advocated "shock therapy", and boy were they shocked! Without effective state control or cultural traditions of capitalism, what was a rotten system of communism turned into a laissez-faire wild west of rampant economic and political corruption. State control has now been re-asserted, but the patterns that formed in those days, which frankly reflect a long history of "informal" political relations throughout the region, persist to this day, despite verying formalities of democracy and rule of law. There remains a fundamental misunderstanding (and mistrust) of what political and economic liberalism means and how the West has gotten to its dominant position, despite centuries of study, copying, inferiority complexes, and deep economic and political relations. Russia remains instinctively authoritarian, not only due to the cleverness of Vladimir Putin, but apparently as a general cultural default. Maybe this did not have to be, maybe there was an opening in the early days of Yeltsin's rule, but our thoughtless and disastrous prescriptions at the time helped sow a bitter harvest. Now Russia equates democracy with weakness, and has decided to demonstrate that principle by deploying its most expert propaganda into our free media spaces.

It is generally realized now that China, in contrast, did things correctly, becoming a booming capitalist state while keeping absolute political control. That is how an properly authoritarian state manages things, (as previously modeled by various Asian tigers, particularly Singapore), and is now a model for Russia among many others. Unlike the Russian breakdown, China's ability to change its spots from communism to capitalism raises deep questions of whether liberalism and democracy are the best system, not only in human rights terms, but in their ability to manage capitalism. For it is clear, from both the Russian debacle and from the Chinese success, that capitalism is not self-perpetuating or self-managing. It relies inextricably on a strong state and legal system that sets rules by which competition among oligarchs, firms, workers, and other actors remains on the economic level, not on the military, political, or criminal levels. Democracy can be responsive to these issues, but we are, in the US, currently in the grip of a very destructive ideology that denigrates the state, is restoring corruption at all levels, and appears heedless of the future in economic, political, and planetary terms. The outcomes of this ideology became frighteningly apparent in our chaotic occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, yet the lesson may still not have been learned.

But getting back to Russia ... The nations of the former USSR have developed in almost linear relation to how closely they are positioned to Europe, geographically and culturally. The Baltic states turned relatively easily and completely to the European model. The middle area of Romania and Bulgaria, among others, have turned more slowly, but are also firmly in the pro-Europe camp. But those bordering Russia, like Belarus out east to Kazakstan, remain authoritarian and mired in "informal relations". Ukraine has tried to buck this trend and is deeply divided. Partly this is due to the large number of expatriate Russians living in these areas. But in any case, each has its own nationalism, and no one wants to re-unite with Russia to remake the old empire. Recent news stories show that even Belarus, Russia's most reliable and sycophantic ally, draws a line.

"Ultimately, Russia, China, and the states of Central Asia share fundamental ideas of what stability in the region looks like and how to maintain it. They are a group of authoritarian states dedicated to maintaining themselves in power and ensuring no Islamist or color revolutions threaten their rule. Whereas they view with great suspicion any Western attempts to open up their societies, Central Asian elites welcome Russian and Chinese support of the status quo."

So Russia is determined to have a club that few want to join. The ex-Soviet republics may share many cultural, political, and economic patterns, and cooperate to some extent in organizations like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, but Russia's dreams of expansion and re-integration are generally rebuffed. It has turned to invasions like the takeover of Crimea, South Ossetia, and the creeping war in Eastern Ukraine, treating its neighbors like piñatas to be whacked at will and bullied with fossil fuel subsidies and threats. It is reminiscent of the spoiler role Pakistan maintains in its region, fomenting unrest in Afghanistan lest that country ever have peace and positive economic development.

And then Russia demands that we all respect its "sphere of influence", as though we were still in Victorian times, playing some sort of great game on a map of the world, and heading in to World War 1. But this supposed sphere is entirely composed of unwilling and oppressed neighbors- not quite as badly treated as in Soviet times, but uniformly uninterested in recreating those glory days. Russia has no intrinsic or deserved "rights" in this respect, despite its vaunting desires- we need to keep offering self-determination and choice to its neighbors, as we do to all other countries around the world. Russia is armed to the teeth, and really needs no defensive buffer of this kind, nor is its cultural influence so positive that its bullying should be regarded as a family matter. Quite the opposite.

NATO countries of Europe, in blue.

Which brings us to NATO. We did not think through its fate very carefully when the cold war ended. NATO stood during the cold war as a defense against the USSR, pure and simple, plus a way to keep Germany pacified and integrated in Europe. When the USSR collapsed (foremost because its captive nationalities and "republics" wanted out), and the Warsaw pact dissolved, we half-heartedly offered coordination to Russia. But never really thought through what our military posture should be towards this new friend, or offered a comprehensive and durable peace. We were, however, eager to integrate as many of the newly ex-Soviet states as wanted to join, such as Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, the Baltic states, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, not to mention various members of the former Yugoslavia. That makes it look like a rather offensive affair, from Russia's perspective. And then Ukraine wanted to join as well. Integrating all these countries into a modern mutual defence organization was certainly positive for them, as one more element of their cultural headlong run away from Russia and communism.

But what is it really defending? One gets the distinct sense that, like in the post-WW2 era, NATO's purpose has become keeping the principal adversary of the latest war at bay. But whereas Germany was integrated into NATO, subject to continued occupation, though of a relatively friendly sort, now the enemy, i.e. Russia, is outside, and is not being killed with kindness, but rather being provoked by encirclement. All this is relatively obvious and not terribly objectionable now, now that Russia has become increasingly anti-Western, but that did not have to be the outcome. (Though Stent is dubious- she maintains that Russia's historical attitude strongly re-asserted itself after the breakup, and it would be chimerical to think that Russia would ever align fully with the West, such as joining NATO and allowing extensive occupation / collaboration by foreign forces- see the quote below) We drifted into it by inertia- by lazy thinking in our foreign policy and military establishments, not to say simple gloating. Would Russia have responded more positively if we had given them a better deal? Only if we had matched it with more effective economic reconstruction assistance as well. But neither of these things happened, and attitudes in Russia quickly hardened and became, understandably, rather bitter. Nevertheless, this does not justify an undeserved sphere of influence or renascent empire on Russia's part. Does Britain demand a sphere over France? Does Germany over Denmark? No. Did we invade Cuba when it turned to communism? Well, sort of and half-heartedly(!)

"As Putin consolidated his rule, it became clear to much of the world that a main reason for Russian's rejection of Western-style economic and political programs was because they are Russians, not because they were communists. Seventy years ago, George Kennan understood that communist ideology reinforced and exacerbated, but did not contradict, the characteristics of traditional tsarist rule. Communism had been superimposed on centuries of Russian autocracy and personalistic rule, and had, if anything, strengthened those traditions. The ideology was a means to consolidate the Bolsheviks' rule, mobilize society, and, with great pain, drag Russian peasants into modernity. ... The minority who supported Gorbachev and Yeltsin and believed that Russia should become more like the West both politically and economically, were outnumbered from the outset."

Reading this book reinforces that it is the US and the West in general that is the revolutionary agent afoot in the world. We are the ones fomenting color revolutions. We are the ones planting thoughts of human rights, rule of law, justice, and prosperity around the world. We think that all this is obvious, progressive, and unexceptional, but democracies are still the minority, and the other countries, notably including Russia and China, have developed a countervailing authoritarian bloc who studiously refrain from criticizing each other's miserable internal politics, and complain ceaselessly about those who do.

Democracy Index, with darker green denoting greater democracy. Note how China rates slightly higher than Russia, due to its better governance and more functional political culture, despite lacking any electoral process.

Are we right to do so? The issue of self-determination is perhaps the thorniest area where this ideology hits the real world- not everyone can or should have their own country. The USSR broke up over the failure of the center to, in the face of countless failures, justify holding on to its huge empire, and has now turned into 15 successor states, most with an ethnic character. Several of those successor states have experienced civil wars and separatist movements of their own. The fact is that few large countries have ever become large by voluntary means. Given generally peaceful conditions, most peoples with any kind of distinct culture want their own country, as is being expressed in such places as Catalonia, Scotland, Quebec, Kurdistan, and even 150 years ago in our own Confederate South. As Stent acidly points out, separatism is Russia's (and China's) bête noir, leading to its brutal repression of Chechnya, among many other places ... until it comes to Ukraine and Georgia, where Russia uses separatism in the most cynical way.

"Russia will push to jettison the post-Cold War, liberal, rules-based international order driven by the US and Europe in favor of a post-West order. For Russia, this order would resemble the nineteenth-century concert of powers, with China, Russia, and the United States dividing the worlds into spheres of influence."

But there was one place that had a "velvet divorce". Slovakia and the Czech Republic parted ways without bloodshed, because they were oriented to the European model, and negotiated their differences. As a foreign policy stance, we should not encourage separatism generally, but should always support peaceful resolutions and reasonable accommodations. One might add in passing that, if one holds an election to validate a minority breaking away, referendums of this sort should have a high bar, such as 75% , rather than the typical 50%. At any rate, this episode illustrates a key point- that the Western model is good, and tends to lead to peaceful and durable outcomes, because it is not repressive and takes people's interests and rights seriously. Repression can keep the peace for a while, but durable, prosperous peace (and good governance) is best kept with respect, moderation, and truthful communication.

So the order of preference, from all these historical lessons, is as follows. The worst government is none, representing chaos and unleashing the worst forms of power- criminal and informal military. The next best is authoritarian, which can range from brutally repressive, like Stalinist Russia, to repressive and even quite functional, if not benevolent, like China, Turkey, and Russia today. And the best is liberal (and functional!) democracy, which respects its citizens while maintaining a strong state. Unfortunately, democracies are difficult to run, have various inefficiencies, and are perpetually at risk of turning to authoritarianism, particularly when new technologies of propaganda arise that can hypnotize and misinform the populace, as happened during the fascist era, and is happening again today.

Does this mean that we should agitate for democracy everywhere and all the time? Yes, in short, it does. We can and must work with all governments as they exist, to manage what interests we have in common. But we should never mistake our instrumental relations with countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia, and China for true friendship and ideological compatibility. We need to keep our eyes on the interests of people across the world now and into the future, which are uniformly best served by freedom and democracy, with strong and effective states founded on the active participation and decisive decision-making by their citizens. Authoritarianism can be an effective form of government, and sometimes a stepping stone to better conditions. But it is not a desirable end-point, and nor is its correlate, a spheres-of-influence world. And who knows? Maybe one of the democracies that we encourage will someday be in a position to save us in turn.

• One view of Russia's tangles with the West.
• Russia's "productive" role in Syria.
• What are the prospects for democracy in poor countries? Dim, but possible.
• Will Russia save the world?
• The toxic legacy of gerrymandering. And of Citizens United.
• Our tax law becomes even more corrupted.
• War has been declared.

Thomas Paine

Target of more than one early American smear campaign. Review of "The life of Thomas Paine", vols 1 and 2.

For an immensely talented, intelligent, and well-meaning man, Thomas Paine had remarkably bad luck at several key junctures of his life. The first was in marriage. No one knows what happened, but he and his wife quickly separated, more or less amicably, leading in part to his desire to move the American Colonies from his native England. Next was in his business dealings. He was not in the least a man of business, and gave away all his writings. This helped make them popular, but left him ultimately penniless. And the little money he had, he gave away freely. Lastly were his political problems in France and with enemies from the American Revolution, which landed him in prison during the French Revolution, and within a hair's breadth of the guillotine.

But he was very fortunate in his biographer, Moncure Conway, who published "The Life of Thomas Paine" in 1892, when lore and records about Paine were still reasonably fresh. Conway was a free-thinker, with deep sympathy with his subject, and this book is as detailed and supportive a biography as one might wish. We all know that Paine published "Common Sense", which cast the arguments for the American revolution in clear, populist language and sparked the national resolve to leave the British empire. He also published a series of follow-up pamphlets during the war, which he served as a foot soldier in Washington's army, that had equally important roles in supporting and funding the war effort, which was continually on the verge of financial and military collapse.

Paine was also an inventor, obsessed with building better bridges, using the improved forms of iron available at the time. This pursuit brought him back to England briefly, where he wrote "Rights of Man", as a response to Edmund Burke's somewhat reactionary "Reflections on the Revolution in France". "Rights of Man" was a comprehensive wrecking ball against monarchichal rule, and was very popular both in England and France. For this, the British government carried out an extensive campaign of villification, prosecuting him for sedition and libel. Paine escaped capture in just the nick of time, crossing the channel and entering France as a hero, feted with parades, and immediately elected to the National Convention.

There, he co-authored a constitution, whose fate illuminates those of the French Revolution in general, and Paine in particular. The National Convention was supposedly a temporary body, empowered, as were the American Continental Congresses and Constitutional Convention, to manage transitional affairs (at first, in France, in collaboration with the king), and to come up with a new constitution. But as crisis piled on crisis, the Convention split into parties- the Girondins and the Montagnards- the latter of whom decided that they didn't need a constitution anyhow, and could rule directly via revolutionary committees. The constitution was scuttled, rule of law went out the window, and the Montagnards, under Robespierre, proceeded to the Terror.

The most interesting and revelatory part of Conway's biography is his detailed account of how Thomas Paine ended up in prison. As a Girondin, and having argued forcefully against executing the king, Paine was definitely on the political outs. The Montagnards soon barred foreigners from serving in the Convention, depriving Paine of his seat. But why send him to prison in December 1793? Here we come to the machinations of the American ambassador to France, Gouverneur Morris. Morris is portrayed as a semi-Tory, supportive of George Washington's nascent reapproachment with Britain, which was consummated in the Jay Treaty of 1795. (Whose fruits would later arrive in the war of 1812.)

Unbeknownst to Paine, Morris also had personal enmities against Paine, who was the most famous and leading American in Paris, functioning in many ways as America's main envoy. The French government sought to remove Morris as ambassador, due to his pro-British, royalist sympathies, but were rebuffed by Washington, helped along by various misreprentations and lies from Morris. This left the French in an awkward position, vis-a-vis their only ally in the world, at which point they started listening to Morris and doing his bidding. And Conway strongly suggests that Morris let it be known at this point that the US would like Paine to be imprisoned, due to insinuations that Paine was a British citizen, a thorn to the Americans, and that Paine had encouraged the activities of the French ambassador to the US, Edmund Genet, who had angered Washington (and his sponsors in the Convention) by organizing pro-French millitias in the US to harry the Spanish in Florida, harass British shipping, and generally encourage party strife, among other vexations.

Conway puts Morris in the center of a plot to imprison, and preferably execute, Thomas Paine, of which just a couple of samples:

"But the fatal far-reaching falsehood of Morris' letter to Jefferson was his assertion that he had claimed Paine as an American. This falsehood, told to Washington, Jefferson, Edmund Randolph, paralyzed all action in America in Paine's behalf; told to the Americans in Paris, it paralyzed further effort of their own."
...
"It may be wondered that Morris should venture on so dangerous a game. But he had secured himself in anything he might choose to do. So soon as he discovered, in the previous summer, that he was not to be removed, and had fresh thunderbolts to wield, he veiled himself from the inspection of Jefferson. This he did in a letter of September 22, 1793. In the quasi-casual way characteristic of him when he is particularly deep, Morris then wrote: 'By the bye, I shall cease to send you copies of my various applications in particular cases, for they will cost .you more in postage than they are worth.' I put in italics this sentence, as one which merits memorable record in the annals of diplomacy."
...
"Told that they must await the action of a distant government, which itself was waiting, for action in Paris, alarmed by the American Minister's hints of danger that might ensue on any misstep or agitation, assured that he was proceeding with the case, forbidden to communicate with Paine, .they were reduced to helplessness. Meanwhile, between silent America and these Americans, all so cunningly disabled, stood the remorseless French Committee, ready to strike or to release in obedience to any sign from the alienated ally, to soothe whom no sacrifice would be too great. Genet had been demanded for the altar of sacred Alliance, but (to Morris' regret) refused by the American government. The Revolution, would have preferred Morris as a victim, but was quite ready to offer Paine."

Paine was eventually freed by the next minister, James Monroe, whom Morris did everything in his power to impede. Monroe claimed Paine as an American Citizen, and that was that. Morris, for his part, escaped in 1794 across the border to Switzerland after getting embroiled in various plots in Paris and becoming even more non-grata than before, and wound up his career in Europe as a royal toady, as Conway puts it: "The ex-Minister went off to play courtier to George III and write for Louis XVIII the despotic proclamation with which monarchy was to be restored in France."

Paine's final landmark work was "Age of Reason", his defense of deism. This led to the most thorough campaign of villification of his life, and long after. What was to the aristocrats of his day and particularly of the American Revolution a common philosophy became in Paine's treatment a popular and populist attack on established religions of all sorts, and the sanctity and veracity of the Bible in particular. Paine derided its fables and contradictions, and proclaimed a simple faith in god, whose evident works were plenty to engender belief, with no need for thrice-told miracles or gold-embroidered priests. While twenty or thirty years before, such a work might have been taken in the revolutionary spirit, America had fallen into a revivalist spirit by this time, and the resurgent methodists and other preachers led a campaign that blackened Paine's reputation for decades, and from which it has only gradually and partially emerged.

One wonders what the Quaker Paine would have made of his religion after Darwin and Lyell, who so thoroughly demolished the deistic reliance on god to explain the most far-reaching and perplexing natural phenomena. I am confident that Paine's intellect, which shines through his writing, would have grappled honestly with these changed circumstances and come out with either a far-attenuated deism, or given it up in favor of full atheism.

• There are many authoritarian institutions in our country.
• It is hard to negotiate with the Taliban.